It’ll be a homecoming of sorts when Jeffrey Grob, currently the auxiliary bishop of Chicago, becomes Archbishop of Milwaukee in January. The archdiocese announced his upcoming appointment Monday.
“I’m a farm boy from Wisconsin,” Grob said in his first public appearance since the announcement. “I grew up, twice a day, milking cows — Brown Swiss!”
“I’m truly thrilled to return to my native Wisconsin,” he said. “It’s personally a great privilege and a blessing to me.”
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The Cross Plains native attended high school at the now-defunct Holy Name Seminary in Madison and has since held several positions in the Archdiocese of Chicago, where he was first ordained in 1992.
He is taking over the position from retiring Archbishop Jerome Listecki, who has held the post since 2010.
Looking forward, Grob stressed the importance of engaging young people in the church.
“Look at how the Lord engaged people — he went out to meet them,” Grob said. “He went to Matthew’s tax collect stand, he called Zacchaeus down from the sycamore tree.”
“There are so many conflicting voices, there are so many talking heads,” he said. “How do we truly inform them of what they may come to know if they engage the church?”
He proposed thinking “outside the box” to “help people to become on fire again with faith.”
The archdiocese administers parishes in southeast Wisconsin. Its boundaries stretch north to Ripon and Sheboygan, and west to Columbus and Whitewater. It also has some oversight over dioceses in Green Bay, Madison, La Crosse and Superior.
According to the archdiocese, there were more than 500,000 registered Catholics attending a total of 189 parishes in the 10-county region as of 2019. The archdiocese also includes 92 Catholic elementary schools and 17 Catholic high schools that together educate nearly 33,000 students.
Some parishes worship in very historic churches. Polish immigrants built Milwaukee’s towering Basilica of St. Josaphat to look like St. Peter’s in Vatican City. The basilica holds thousands. And on a roadside in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, the 1861-built St. Matthias Mission still holds mass inside its log walls during the summer.
According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, around 30 percent of Catholic parishes in southeast Wisconsin have closed or merged since 1964. Often, individual church buildings continue holding mass even after their parishes merge.
Grob said he would approach parish consolidation “case-by-case,” calling it “dangerous” to implement overarching consolidation plans.
The newspaper also reported that over 100,000 parishioners left the archdiocese since 2010, and that infant baptisms have fallen 41 percent in that period.
In 2015, the archdiocese paid a $21 million settlement to hundreds of people who’d been sexually abused by its clergy as children. The settlement ended a four-year bankruptcy fueled by the cost of litigating abuse claims.
In a statement, clergy abuse advocacy group Nate’s Mission called the choice of Grob “alarming,” citing abuse allegations against an Illinois priest under Grob’s supervision.
The group claims “Grob’s focus was on the comfort and protection of the twice-accused cleric,” noting the new archbishop will inherit a trove of documents his predecessor had withheld from a statewide clergy abuse investigation.
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